Monthly Archives: January 2019

This report in WaPo is discouraging, if it turns out to be true:

A secret effort to influence the 2017 Senate election in Alabama used tactics inspired by Russian disinformation teams, including the creation of fake accounts to deliver misleading messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of voters to help elect Democrat Doug Jones in the deeply red state, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.

But unlike the 2016 presidential campaign when Russians worked to help elect Donald Trump, the people behind the Alabama effort — dubbed Project Birmingham — were Americans. Now Democratic operatives and a research firm known to have had roles in Project Birmingham are distancing themselves from its most controversial tactics. …

Recent revelations about Project Birmingham, however, have shocked Democrats in Alabama and Washington. And news of the effort has underscored the warnings of disinformation experts who long have said that threats to honest, transparent political discourse in the age of social media are as likely to be domestic as foreign.

It efficacy has not been ascertained as of yet, but that’s not really the point, because the up front question has to be Is this the right thing to do?

Now, we know what Trump operative and Mueller target Roger Stone would say:

Roger Stone is pleased to be known as a campaign “dirty trickster.”  A former Trump campaign aide and Republican operative, he has embraced his past as practitioner of the political dark arts. “One man’s dirty tricks,” he has said, are “another man’s political, civic action. He has warned that “Politics ain’t bean bag, and losers don’t legislate.” Going still further, he has articulated as one of his “rules” for success that “To win you must do everything.” Yet he has also insisted that, “Everything I do, everything I’ve ever done has been legal.”  [Bob Bauer, Lawfare]

His bald embrace of the old lie that “all’s fair in politics” is why I think Stone comes across as one of the more loathsome members of our national political soap opera. A willingness to discard social norms, to engage in deception, in the name of victory has a long history of short-term earnings but long-term disaster.

And this, apparently, is a large part of this Project Birmingham, allegedly run in support of underdog Democratic candidate, Jeff Jones, for the Alabama Senate seat of Jeff Sessions, in which Jones very narrowly defeated Republican former Alabama Supreme Court Justice (twice removed for cause) Roy Cooper. If true – and this has not been verified, so far as I understand it – then this willingness to use deceptive tactics pioneered by the Republicans has two repercussions of vast importance.

First, it tars the Democrats, to some extent, with the black, gooey stuff that already obscures so many Republicans. This is tragic because the Republicans have not been showing wisdom in their governance, but rather ideological rigidity, which is to say allegiance to positions that are becoming clearly false, such as lowering taxes will induce riches. Democrats, on the other hand, are willing to investigate and debate new ideas and toss out ideology that has proven false. Tarring themselves with deception can do them no good.

More importantly, though, is the negative impact on the entirety of politics. I’ve been disturbed of late at the FB posts suggesting that all politicians lack the code of ethics we should expect of them (this includes those with the message that term limits should be imposed, which tends to serve the goal of ensuring our legislatures are smothered in well-meaning amateurs, self-centered gold-diggers, and even the odd malevolent entity bought by national adversaries). This is not only unfair to those who do adhere to a plausible set of ethics, but it also leaves large numbers of citizens, especially those in the younger generations, discouraged and even alienated from the idea of public service.

Of course, this can become so toxic that many decide to serve in order to correct the problem, as we saw in the recent mid-term elections. Perhaps some of them will step up to the plate within the Democratic Party in order to ban such efforts in the future. Such a move would result in positive returns as people realize, through aggressive reporting by the press, that only the Republicans continue to engage in deceptive practices in order to win. A useful Democratic tactic might be to ask if the Republicans’ policy proposals are really so discredited that they have to resort to deception in order to win public elections.

But I do remain discouraged at the lack of moral and political sense shown by those operatives who tried pulling the political levers. They really should have known better. “All’s fair in xyz” is never, ever true – in the long run.

Readers who are aware of the Republican Party dishonorable hijinks in North Carolina will be interested in the report from Mark Joseph Stern of Slate on their latest delaying tactics concerning the elimination of gerrymandering:

GOP lawmakers devised a rather startling theory: They alleged that the plaintiffs were attempting to force North Carolina to violate the Voting Rights Act, the 14^th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and the 15^th Amendment’s bar on race-based voter suppression. How, exactly, could an effort to remedy partisan gerrymandering wind up disenfranchising minorities? Republicans argued that if the current map were invalidated, either the North Carolina Supreme Court or the General Assembly would have to draw new districts. And, they insisted, neither could do so without trampling on the voting rights of racial minorities. The argument implies that both legislators and the justices are too racist to be trusted to redraw the maps in a way that wouldn’t violate the Constitution.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Louise W. Flanagan rightly tossed out this embarrassing Hail Mary, sending the case back to North Carolina court. Flanagan noted that she would explain her full reasoning in a later opinion, but it’s easy to see why she kicked out the case: It has no business in federal court, it is built upon a strange and offensive legal theory, and it is obviously just a delaying tactic—a bid to run down the clock so that new maps cannot be drawn before the 2020 election. Flanagan, a moderate conservative appointed by George W. Bush, had no desire to become complicit in the North Carolina GOP’s undemocratic machinations.

And that puts it back on track to end up in front of a Democrat-dominated state Supreme Court, with time to actually redraw the boundaries. Will North Carolina Republicans continue to squall about how redrawing the boundaries in any way but the one that keeps them in power?

And just how did North Carolina Republicans fare in the mid-terms? From Ballotpedia’s report on the NC Senate results:

Republicans maintained their majority in the North Carolina State Senate in the November 6, 2018, elections, winning 29 seats to Democrats‘ 21. Democrats, however, broke the Republican supermajority in the chamber by keeping them below 30 seats. All 50 Senate seats were up for election in 2018.

Heading into the elections, Republicans had a 34-15 majority. The seat previously held by Republican David Curtis was vacant. Democrats needed to win six seats to break Republicans’ three-fifths supermajority, the margin necessary to override gubernatorial vetoes.

And the NC House?

Republicans maintained their majority in the North Carolina House of Representatives in the November 6, 2018, elections, winning 65 seats to Democrats‘ 55. Democrats, however, broke the Republican supermajority in the chamber by keeping them below 72 seats. All 120 House seats were up for election in 2018.

Heading into the elections, Republicans had a 75-45 majority. Democrats needed to win four seats to break Republicans’ three-fifths supermajority, the margin necessary to override gubernatorial vetoes.

Thus forcing the Republicans to reconsider their extremism, now that they are not the supreme political force in the State. The governor is held by Democrat Cooper, and the judiciary, to the extent that it is political, has a Supreme Court mostly containing judges elected under the Democratic banner.

The Republicans are far from being discredited to the extent that they must reform, but a step has been taken. Now there’s pressure on the Democrats to be wise in the governance they can exert.

And then there’s the corruption which potentially occurred in District 9, in which Republican Mark Harris had apparently beaten Democrat Dan McCready for a seat in the Federal House Of Representatives, but then a controversy arose concerning absentee ballots being illegally collected and discarded by a Republican operative, and the election board refused to certify the election result – unanimously. That corruption may spark more resentment towards the dominant Republicans, leaking away their support among the independents on which they depend.

An exciting, if frustrating, election result, if you’re a North Carolinian.

Will the bluefin tuna, a top ocean predator, survive mankind’s blundering ways? Well, in this report concerning a single, fresh-caught tuna sold for $3.1 million …

Bluefin tuna is highly valued for its taste in sushi restaurants, but decades of overfishing have sent stocks plummeting. …

“The celebration surrounding the annual Pacific bluefin auction hides how deeply in trouble this species really is,” said Jamie Gibbon, associate manager of global tuna conservation at The Pew Charitable Trusts. “Its population has fallen to less than 3.5 percent of its historic size and overfishing still continues today.”

In response to the growing scarcity of the fish, Japan and other governments agreed in 2017 to strict quotas and restrictions on fishing, in an attempt to rebuild stocks from 20 percent of historic levels by 2034.

That has caused considerable unhappiness and some hardship in Oma. …

Hundreds of Japanese fishermen also protested against the new quotas outside the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in June, while Oma also canceled its annual tuna festival in October in protest.

But Gibbon lamented that Japan and other countries were already lobbying for higher catch quotas for 2019, just one year into the 16-year recovery plan, while also noting reports of Japanese fishermen discarding and not reporting dead bluefin to avoid exceeding their quotas. [WaPo]

The immediate question is what will the Japanese do when the tuna are gone? Will they abjectly take responsibility, as it won’t matter? Or will they disavow it?

Image source: Tillamook County Pioneer

Or will the Japanese decline in population^[1] be rapid enough to save the bluefin tuna from oblivion? Probably not, as I doubt the decline is rapid enough, but it’s worth considering the fact that human overpopulation is the single largest factor in the decline and extinction of many species world-wide – regardless of them being land- or sea-based. If tuna have sentience, I doubt they’re laughing that at least they get to poison those who prey on them with mercury. (I have a friend who, until recently, had dangerous levels of mercury in his body, attributable to his tuna addiction.)

But over-population is not the entire problem. Fragmentary information is also a problem, as if we had perfect information, then we’d realize that this problem is of our own causing, and the fishermen would be collaborating on how to rebuild that population – and not be clamoring to commit industry suicide. That is the most macabrely funny part of this little story of mankind vs the fishes, that the future is not as important as is tomorrow.

And how we’re going to get past that wall in our path is a supremely important question.

¹ Another WaPo article which, ironically, explores the damage the Japanese demographic decline is doing to Japan’s economy, if in fact it’s really damage at all:

According to a new report from the Japanese government, Japanese women had 921,000 babies in 2018. That’s the fewest births since comparable records began in 1899 — when the country’s population was a third its current size.

Meanwhile, deaths in Japan hit their highest level in nearly a century. Put together, that means the country’s population is shrinking rapidly, experiencing its largest natural decline on record.

Why does this matter? Well, it’s hard for an economy to grow with fewer workers. And as more people age out of the workforce, a swelling number of retirees must depend on a shrinking number of working people to power the economy. The tax base required to fund public services for those retirees — including health care and elder care — also shrinks.

Perhaps this is the idolatry of the perpetually growing economy. In the more extreme wings of the left side of the political spectrum, this idolatry has been called in question. I would do so simply because it’s so abjectly accepted by the author of this article, who goes on to suggest that if the United States wants to avoid the Japanese problems, then it should begin adopting policies much like those under exploration in Japan. The article seems to completely ignore the problems population growth will bring on, fixating only on the well-known problems of a growing retiree demographic in combination with a static or shrinking worker base.

This is one of the great conundrums of the age, and may not end well at all. I keep hoping for some unexpected solution, though, such as a great leap forward in medicine such that the elderly experience ill health for only a month, and are otherwise healthy and able to work. The other options are far less appetizing; macabre, even.

From Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee in WaPo concerning implantable devices and the FDA:

Although the FDA insists that high-risk devices undergo “stringent” testing to win approval, few actually do. A recent study, for example, found that only 5 percent of the highest-risk implantable cardiac devices were subjected to clinical trials on par with the testing required for drug approval.

In 1976, when medical devices first came under the regulatory control of the FDA, the agency simply grandfathered in all devices that were already on the market. Under this provision, known as the 510(k) pathway, new artificial joints, cataract lens implants and thousands of other devices developed after 1976 can win approval for sale (or “clearance” in FDA parlance) if the product is shown to have “substantial equivalence” to a previously cleared “predicate” device.” Four out of five devices are cleared for sale this way. Of those, at least 95 percent were cleared without clinical studies, according to research by Diana Zuckerman and her colleagues at the National Center for Health Research.

This “predicate” nonsense is especially alarming. Speaking as a software engineer, building a device from the ground-up, and then exempting it from all testing, in particular safety testing, simply because it’s similar to another device, is a sign of sheer madness. It’s a sign of vast incompetence in the FDA, or, more likely, of malevolent influence of the FDA by the industry it’s assigned to regulate. And, in fact, that’s what the article states.

If you’re a candidate for an implantable device, it might be wise to ask the surgeon if the device has been through the rigorous FDA approval scheme and s/he’s read the reports, or if it’s been exempted under the “predicate” protocol. If the latter, request an alternative recommendation of a device which has been fully tested, and that s/he write a letter of reprimand to the FDA, with a copy going to the local newspaper.

It’s a good article. Go read it.

The email bag has delivered something non-political that still has gotten under my skin.

Not only is this fantastic technology, but India now makes patches – and complete highway restorations – out of recycled plastic bags, which are holding up better and lasting much longer than traditional macadam.  Wow!

High Tech Pothole Repair

Now this is truly inspired, though the public employee unions will never stand for it.  It eliminates way too many jobs for guys standing around, leaning on shovels.

Then an mp4 is attached to the mail. Here is a YouTube video which appears to have the mp4 embedded in a story about Moscow’s pothole problem.

What is getting my attention? First, I haven’t heard of this from a real news source; second, the video appears to be a bad CGI video rather than real life. Third, the size of the machine implies so much mass that, in Earth’s gravity field, I expect the city streets on which it works would themselves crumble, as well as the sidewalk when the stabilizers are deployed and end up on the sidewalk, as one of the demos shows.

So I went looking on the Web. That leads to the fourth clue – I didn’t find a site dedicated to promoting this technology and its originator, whoever that might be. Ordinarily, it’d be right at the top of the search results. I found a couple of videos, but the first real results seems to be an article in the Detroit Free Press, which, at least in the past, was a reputable news source. I don’t really regard this as a strong clue, but still it’s the sort of thing that tells me that whoever is pumping this technology, which probably doesn’t exist, isn’t really competent to the task of evaluating the technology. Here’s the tell-tale paragraph.

Besides being James Bond cool, the machine can repair potholes in less than two minutes at a cost savings of 500% versus traditional repairs. The precision plugs will outlast typical poured asphalt solutions by years, and also provide a smooth ride for motorists compared to the uneven patchwork of today. With the new speed, precision, and quality, potholes could be diminished to the point of urban legend instead of major headache.

Did you catch the megablunder? “… cost savings of 500% …” OK, a lot of folks like to hide behind their innumeracy, but, rhetoric aside, I’m quite serious when I say that this should catch every last person’s attention, because this is simple math. Let me explain a trivial method for recognizing the meaning of that blunderous phrase.

If you had a 50% cost savings, that would mean the city is only paying half of what it’s paying now for pothole repair. Amazing! It’s worth checking out!

If you had a 100% cost savings, that means it costs nothing to repair those potholes. Even if you have to pay for the machine, that still implies the materials and power are free. Wait a minute, something’s not right here…

So, by simple progression, if you had a 500% cost savings … well … I think the manufacturer is paying the city to take the machine. Or that rubble they generate during application of the patch is apparently more valuable than gold nuggets. Wait, am I a sucker … ?

In my estimation, not finding anything believable on a quick & simple search suggests this is a hoax. I have no idea why anyone would make this video, unless it’s a school project for their computer graphics class – and then they should only get a ‘B’ on it, because the realism factor is markedly off.

And, yeah, this was just venting. The video on its own? Not worthy of comment. The guy in the Detroit Free Press who has no idea what he’s babbling about, or is a pumper? That irritates me. The editors at the Detroit Free Press should have caught it.

And me venting all over my readers is part of what this blog is all about.

There are, I’m sure, many reports on the swearing in of new members of Congress. I’ll use ursulafaw’s report on The Daily Kos, just because it’s convenient:

Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib asked to be sworn into the House of Representatives using a Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson in lieu of a Bible and the proverbial s*it hit the fan. To add a comic spin to the proceeding, none other than evangelical wingnut Vice President Mike Pence conducted the swearing in where this (undoubtedly to his mind) heretical request was made.

Etc etc (in the usual progressive patronizing tone of voice). Another new member used a law book, which motivates me to say:

ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE.

Look, we’re a secular nation, and these folks are taking an oath to defend the Constitution, etc etc. So why the hell aren’t they, that is, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, taking it on [a copy of] the Constitution? It’d be affirming, far less divisive, and all that rot.

No?

In NewScientist (22 December 2018, paywall), Douglas Heaven suggests the machines just about have us beat when it comes to games:

Gamers everywhere were watching as OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab co-founded by Elon Musk, pitted a team of bots against some of the world’s best Dota 2 players at an annual tournament back in June.

Machines had been on a winning streak. In 2016, DeepMind’s AI mastered Go. In 2017, a poker-playing bot called Libratus, developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, won a professional Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em tournament. Dota 2, a popular online battle game, looked to be next in line.

In the end, the bots beat amateur players and lost to pros – but that probably won’t be the case next time. “I think OpenAI’s chances are pretty high,” says Julian Togelius at New York University.

But this caught my eye as a vital clue as to the irrelevancy of the claim:

After playing thousands of years’ worth of the game, Open AI’s bots managed to beat a team of amateurs, largely by dominating skirmBut lishes. The bots have a reaction time of 0.2 seconds – roughly that of humans – but in that instant they can take in the entire state of the game, including details that human players have to click on or switch screens to read.

This makes the bots formidable in battle because they know the exact effect of any action at all times. The bots are also ruthless. Human players often get killed trying to save their buddies. Bots aren’t so stupid.

Or are they?

Let’s divide games into two categories, those that are fundamentally single player, such as chess, fencing^[1], or wrestling, and those that are fundamentally team events, such as football (either variety), rugby, or Data 2. I want to discard the former category from this analysis because it lacks subtlety in the interesting facet to be described, focus on the latter category, and concentrate on that statement: Bots aren’t so stupid.

Let’s consider the differences between the players in Data 2. On one side, you have human players. They have lives before and after the game. These lives may include further interactions with their team members, often in another game. Their activities during this game are not only focused on winning this game, but on being invited to play the next game. Humans are social creatures who value interactions and social membership, and to win those, they must show that they will work for the good of the group as well as winning. Think about the “hot-dogging” team member on a football or basketball squad. He or she may be supremely talented or skilled, and considered the key member of the team – but, because they may not be willing to do the down ‘n dirty stuff that such team competitions often require, and certainly hog the limelight, they will find themselves oustered from the team, despite their value. By being willing to take a risk to rescue a teammate, that team member isn’t just playing to win today, but to be part of tomorrow’s game.

On the other side, you have “bots,” computer programs which run autonomously. Perhaps cleverly programmed, or perhaps trained (as in this case) on thousands of renditions of a game. But bots? Bots are not social creatures. That’s not yet part of any AI I’ve ever heard of. They do not plan for anything beyond the end of the game.

They literally have no future.

So there are two strategies going on here. One side plays the game, with no concept of anything outside of it, while the other side is playing not only for this game, but for games in the future – and social membership.

The subtle differences in tactics appears to tell an important tale.

¹ Yes, there are fencing team events of various formats, such as relay, but in the end each constituent bout is still a one-on-one encounter.

In case you were wondering about the breadth of the impact of the Trump Government Shutdown, here’s a sample, courtesy an AL Monitor mailing, concerning Middle East lobbying of the US Government:

From Leah Crane in NewScientist (22 December 2018) concerning the new Event Horizon Telescope’s (a composite entity, actually) attempts to actually image a black hole:

The EHT collaboration’s images will look not like a sphere of darkness, but rather a banana of light. As the black hole rotates, it actually drags light along with it. This causes a bright crescent to appear on the side rotating towards us, juxtaposed with a dark shadow from the event horizon – the edge of the black hole itself.

Dragging light. That’s just a fascinating thought for this ignorant old software engineer. I would have expected the hold hole to bend light around it.

A reader remarks on my the market may be in a perform perfect storm commentary:

Come on negative Nancy, look at this way we have lived through at least 3 recessions, the sun came up this morning and We are still breathing lol, 😂.
Have a great day 🤗

Yes, hopefully we all are still breathing – but remember, there was a recession where the investors fell from the sky like rain, but without rain’s grace and charm.

For what it’s worth, the market recovered its losses and perhaps more yesterday, with the DJIA up 3.3% – and it was the laggard of the big three. The market supposedly reacted positively to unexpectedly good employment numbers, an unemployment rate which ticked up a tenth of a point, and some remarks from Fed Reserve chairman Jerome Powell which seemed to indicate the Fed won’t be the vampire that swoops in and sucks the nation dry.

Ahem.

I can remember when good employment numbers caused the market to sink, because the expectation would be that wages would go up due to competition for workers in a shrinking availability pool, thus lowering corporate profits, so I’m uncertain how much weight to give to the employment numbers assertion of yesterday. Perhaps no weight should be given to it. Perhaps investors have figured out that, in order to spend, people must first have at least a prospect of higher wages in front of them. But it’s worth reading Kevin Drum’s recent furious rant about the phantom of rising wages:

If you want to look at wage growth, you have to adjust for inflation. Period. There are only a very few specialized instances where you want to look at nominal wages, and those are unlikely to come up in ordinary conversation. So for the last time, here is real wage growth for blue-collar workers over the past five years:

To the extent that official inflation numbers are an effective proxy for however price inflation impacts you – and, remember, there were NO SMARTPHONES (you in the back row, stop twitching!) back in 1966, so how do you integrate them into inflation numbers? – blue collar workers have made no progress.

Outside of possibly owning smartphones, flat screen hi-res TVs, improved vehicles, etc.

Baaaaaack to the topic, so what’s driving the market? I’d put $10 – but no more – into the pool that says this is all about algorithms. Look, it’s hard to write computer algorithms that are working in what may be positive feedback loops, and I’m talking individual feedback loops; I’m not even sure how an individual algorithm would deal with a cumulative feedback loop. Can it be written, or trained, to recognize such a beast and either GET OUT NOW or TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE LESSER ALGORITHMS? ‘cuz that’s what they’re all about, those algorithms. Try to catch the other algorithms unaware.

It’s damn silly and I still haven’t seen a good argument to even permit their use.

Be careful out there on the trading floor. We pruned off a couple of stocks to get us out of the fossil fuel industry, something we should have done years ago, but I’m a slug. Otherwise, we’re planning to hold tight. We thought we had some dry powder, but unexpected medical expenses may shoot the chance to take advantage of a potential Trump Recession. But so long as we don’t panic and sell, we should be ok.

You?

The first special election since the midterms is coming up for a state Senate seat in Virginia, and this information is coming from a, well, I’ll call it a shakedown mailing just because I think it’s a fun phrase. It’s from the DLCC:

We’re down to the final 4 days of a crucial special election campaign for Virginia’s 33rd Senate District, and the news isn’t good:

Top Republicans have poured tens of thousands of dollars into this snap election in recent weeks, hoping to overpower Democrats and deliver a huge victory for Donald Trump in the very first special election of 2019.

Grassroots Democrats have been stepping up across the country to help our nominee, Jennifer Boysko, fight back, but we need a BIG final push to counter the GOP’s late money and make sure Democrats like Jennifer deliver a statement win to start the year off strong.

We’re down to the final 4 days until the very first special election of 2019. Please RUSH a donation to help push great Democrats like Jennifer to victory everywhere >>

And, while the first special election is mildly interesting in its own right, I was actually more interested in the content of this letter – and how it’s trying to inspire fear in its reader. I mean, just consider that second paragraph … “Top Republicans have poured tens of thousands of dollars into this snap election in recent weeks, hoping to overpower Democrats and deliver a huge victory for Donald Trump in the very first special election of 2019.” Playing on loathing for President Trump, the fear of the Big Money that is perceived to fund the conservative causes, and the possibility of a big triumph for Trump, it’s all about the money the DLCC wants.

Not about the analysis.

I read this and wondered if this was a play for a seat held by a Republican, because – despite the emotional manipulation – it would make some sense, even this late in the game, to try to buy enough ad space to wake up previously dormant voters who might vote for the lonely, windswept, fig-leafed Democrat who has only the least of chances to win victory –

Er, sorry about that. My strain of purple prose is struggling to get out. I’ll use a hammer on it. The hammer of reason.

So, let’s talk about Virginia’s 33rd State Senate District. Is this a chance to flip for the Democrats? Ballotpedia says … no. The previous election for this seat:

How about the previous election? That one wasn’t even as close as this one. The one before that? Nope.

This is a long-time Democratic seat, although it was Republican previous to 2010 – which may have been a redistricting year. Is it in danger? I doubt it, but on the other hand, it appears the Republican is quite the moderate, if I’m to believe this article in the Loudoun Times-Mirror, a local news source. No mention of Trump on the front page of his website, which may be a strategic move to appear more moderate after watching many extreme Republicans go down to defeat. Perhaps Trump won’t be entirely pleased if May were to win, because that would signal the Republicans moving away from Trump’s extreme positions. Well, extreme when he’s not being so erratic …

But now I’m off point. My real point is that the Democrats seem to be using fear tactics in order to harvest some dollars. Whether this is really true is only known to those who authorized this campaign, and whether it’s necessary will only be known when the votes are counted. If the Democrat, Boysko, wins by a comfortable margin, then the answer is No. If Republican May wins or makes it a close run, then the answer is Yes.

But I still dislike the DLCC missive. It’s little more than an electoral scare tactic.

NewScientist (22 December 2018, paywall) notes the latest evidence of Alzheimer’s, one of my personal bugaboos, spreading from person to person:

GROWTH hormones given to children decades ago seem to have spread proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

Between 1958 and 1985, approximately 30,000 children around the world received injections of human growth hormone extracted from the pituitary glands of dead people. These were used to treat genetic disorders and growth deficiencies.

Three years ago, while looking at the brains of eight people who had such injections and later died of the rare brain disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), John Collinge at University College London and his colleagues noticed they all had beta-amyloid proteins in their brains.

Beta-amyloid is known to accumulate and form sticky plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. These eight people didn’t have Alzheimer’s, as they all died from CJD at a young age, but Collinge says that had they lived, the presence of beta-amyloid suggests it is possible that they would have gone on to develop the illness.

I can hear the cries of the anti-science types from here. Deliberate poisoning and all that shit. This part’ll be ignored, or not understood:

The team wondered whether growth hormone itself stimulates the accumulation of beta-amyloid proteins or if the hormones were contaminated with this protein. To investigate, Collinge and his team examined samples of the growth hormone given to these eight people, which had been archived in the UK. They found beta-amyloid proteins in those samples. Also present were tau proteins, which are implicated in Alzheimer’s too.

The growth hormone used by the eight people who died of CJD was extracted from cadavers using one particular method. So Collinge and his team also looked at growth hormone prepared from cadavers using three other methods, and found no sign of beta-amyloid or tau proteins.

Of all the sciences, I often think biology is the most difficult; I’ve read somewhere that astronomers claim the innards of a star are nowhere near close to the complexity of the innards of a frog. My point? Medicine is damn hard, and sometimes I tire of people running around with their eyes bugged out over the latest medical faux-pas. Sure, sometimes there’s real, culpable fault to assign when it comes to medical blunders. Human greed can infiltrate the medical community like any other, and the pharma industry has spent decades casting that greed as a virtue rather than the corrupting influence that it is.

But the anti-vaxxers just make me tired and cynical about whether it’s real worth saving humanity.

A reader reacts to my proposal to flood the Internet with deepfakes of everyone having sex with everyone else:

Wiping out the myth will combat it, for sure. Good idea. I wonder what the side effect of not being able to believe anything you see any longer is, however.

At least on video.

But this reminds me of some background for an undeveloped novel of the near future. The pertinent idea was the saturation of society with Virtual Reality (VR). The visual was that a significant portion of society indulged in VR in public. In this fictional background, VR goggles are passé, and the desirable technology appears to be a holographic globe. From the outside, it may be opaque or translucent; the user sees the virtual reality incorporated into the holographic walls of the globe. The VR would be adaptive to local reality in such a way as to keep the user relatively safe, such as projecting a wall to keep the user from straying into a road used by real-world vehicles.

I had not considered the digital security of such a device, however, and if VR ever manages to take off, it’ll become a significant concern for anyone associated with VR. The potential damages seem almost immeasurable, and, to some extent, unpredictable.

And this may already be happening. I’m aware of certain industries, such as elevators, in which VR-like goggles which enhance the vision of technicians are a requirement of the trade. Since these are digital and connect with a home base, this renders them vulnerable to intrusion, especially if security is, as usual, lax.

To circle around to my reader’s comment, if computing and energy resource problems can be solved, an entertainment VR technology much like I visualize doesn’t seem to be out of the question – and it’ll be a tempting target to criminals ranging from simple thieves to sophisticated assassins. The problem of trusting what you see may be compounded.

Market skepticism continues, as the chart for the DJIA as of 1/3/2019 demonstrates:

CNN/Business‘ analysts are blaming the drop on …

Apple warned it will badly miss its quarterly sales forecast because of weakening growth and trade tensions in China. …

Beyond Apple, investors were also rattled by the biggest one-month decline in US factory activity since the Great Recession. The closely-watched ISM manufacturing index tumbled to a two-year low, providing further evidence of slowing growth and pain from the US-China trade war. ISM said manufacturing activity is still growing, but suffered a “sharp decline” last month.

“Awful, and worse to come,” Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote to clients on Thursday. “Trade wars are not easy to win.”

WaPo has a deeper analysis of the Chinese economy, suggesting the world’s second largest economy may not only be slowing down, but – a problem common to autocratic nations – may not be putting out trustworthy numbers:

While a number of factors may have played into Apple’s travails, including political tensions and a trade war with the United States, the news from the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters seems to affirm a warning that Chinese economic observers have been sounding for years, particularly in the last few months: The slowdown in China’s economy might be worse than many appreciate — and so, too, are the spillover effects.

“China’s economy is definitely slowing quite a bit across a bunch of sectors, and this slowing momentum is likely to continue for another couple of months at least,” said Arthur Kroeber, founder of Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing. “And consumer confidence is definitely down, which is probably part of what’s behind the Apple numbers.” …

Although Chinese officials report that GDP has been growing at more than 6 percent a year for a few years, “it looks truly like some sixth grader got out their ruler and drew a straight line with a slight downward slant,” said Christopher Balding, an expert on the Chinese economy at Fulbright University in Vietnam. “It’s totally unrealistic.”

And it’s unrealistic to think that an economy that large could continue to grow at 6%. After all, that implies that the inputs must also grow at roughly the same rate, and when it comes to tangible inputs such as metals, lumber, even sand for concrete, well, it can be quite difficult to expand an input by 6% when the base number is already quite large.

And then deal with the accompanying environmental damage.

So, assuming the Chinese are found to be cheating, what will that mean for the global markets? Beats the hell out of me, but I don’t think I’ll be off in left field if I state it’s going to be a bad thing. Add in the GOP’s destructive tax “reform” of 2017, Trump’s unsurprising lie that Trade wars are easy to win!, Trump’s Shutdown, and what we may be looking at is that tired old saying, A perfect storm.

Hang on tight and keep some powder dry, as they say. Try not to fire prematurely; the ejection of Trump from the Oval Office may be a salient signal of light at the end of the tunnel, although Pence is a relatively unknown quantity, and his time as Indiana’s governor was discouraging.

Much like the attack on Rank Choice Voting (RCV) in Maine, the The New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse reports on a favored phrase of Republican-appointed judges and justices, and so I see memes are an important part of the Republican arsenal of weapons:

Why is this happening, and why now? To understand why the “second-class right” meme is suddenly penetrating the judicial conversation, we have to begin with Justice Clarence Thomas. He is not the first member of the current Supreme Court to use the phrase; Justice Samuel Alito Jr. used it in his 2010 opinion that extended the analysis of the Heller decision, which had applied only to Washington, D.C., as a federal enclave, to the states. The court was being asked, Justice Alito wrote in McDonald v. City of Chicago, “to treat the right recognized in Heller as a second-class right,” which he said the court would not do.

But it is Justice Thomas who has taken up the phrase as a weapon, using it in a series of opinions over the past four years to accuse his colleagues of failing in their duty to keep pushing back against limitations on gun ownership and use. The opinions were all dissents from the court’s decisions not to hear particular gun-rights appeals.

Followed by echoes in the inferior Federal courts by conservative judges. (For forgetful types, like myself, the 2nd Amendment to the American Constitution is “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.“)

This approach of corrupting honest debate by linking arguments temporally and geographically distributed arguments using emotional phrasing (which is something I deliberately do every time I suggest the GOP is a bunch of second-raters – and I do believe that) is the mark of a sophisticated social messaging campaign. It may not be targeted at the general public, but the community of lawyers is big enough to make it worthwhile. And what entity has made a name for itself in this area?

In light of this previous posting on the possibilities of malicious, anonymous Russian interference in American culture, which I still freely admit is brightly, even enjoyably paranoid, one is left to wonder if the far-right members of the judiciary are being manipulated, to their knowledge or not, by the Russians. After all, it makes little sense to arm teachers, to arm the mentally ill, to make high powered firearms available to those with undetected mental illness – or of a murderous temperament, if that does not fit into the category of mental illness. People are habitually careless and sometimes malicious. We need to understand this. These surprising statements about the 2nd Amendment from Justices Thomas and Alito, an Amendment over which appropriate readings remain highly controversial – and decidedly so, given its ambiguous form – is hardly an acceptable approach to the issue. It ignores the Amendment’s ambiguities and attempts to extend the possibly absurd interpretations as if they’re a settled societal matter – an assertion that is pointedly false.

And that extension of which I spoke leads to my last point. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, we are a country of limited rights, not unlimited rights. For example, yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater may be an example of speech, but if there’s no fire, then your free speech rights do not protect you from arrest, conviction, and punishment.

Therefore, there is nothing wrong with suggesting the right to arms is limited, for if we don’t, then every nitwit with a grudge and a few bucks could go out and buy a full-fledged machine gun. Every attempt to make it illegal would fall under the Alito / Thomas reasoning. And the toll in Las Vegas would have been far higher than the “mere” 50+ we so sadly suffered on that cursed night.

The second-rate meme is a feint, a magician’s trick to distract attention from the real issue of limited rights by slyly invoking emotional thinking in a context that cries out for rational analysis. I use that meme as a descriptive insult of the GOP, supported by the evidence of the last 8 years; these conservative judges are using it as a distraction from the real issues of mass killings of children and adults, a situation which sows chaos in our society – and division in our shared heart.

The long-range strategy to invalidate ranked choice voting (RCV), begun in Maine, continues:

I’ve signed off on the CD2 election result as it’s no longer in federal court. Ranked Choice Voting didn’t result in a true majority as promised-simply a plurality measured differently. It didn’t keep big money out of politics & didn’t result in a more civil election #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/0fEhD1dvAb

— Paul R. LePage (@Governor_LePage) December 28, 2018

Note Stolen Election is scrawled next to LePage’s initials. The goal is to spread the meme that RCV is not a valid voting system. How well this strategy will work is a little questionable in this case, as I doubt a sizable portion of the populace ever views such documents, and while Twitter is popular, I’m not sure this will attract a lot of attention, since soon-to-be-former Governor LePage (R-ME) has been considered a poor governor:

The two most unpopular governors in the country, Republican Mary Fallin in Oklahoma and Democrat Dan Malloy in Connecticut, are both leaving office in January with similarly anemic approval ratings — 17 percent for Fallin and 20 percent for Malloy. Opposing partisans in both states are hoping the sour taste left in voters’ mouths from their tenures will bring electoral dividends next month following two terms out of power.

It’s a similar story with Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Rick Snyder of Michigan and Paul LePage of Maine, three term-limited Republicans who will leave office in January. Fifty-four percent of New Mexicans, 54 percent of Mainers and 50 percent of Michiganders respectively disapproved of Martinez, LePage and Snyder during the third quarter. [Morning Consult]

But spreading the meme does remain part of their strategy.

In concert with this thread concerning the South Carolina GOP’s deepening allegiance to President Trump and Senator-elect Romney’s (R-UT) sharply critical op-ed in WaPo, now the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself is considering protecting President Trump from challengers, according to the Washington Examiner:

Mitt Romney’s scorching critique of President Trump in a New Year’s Day op-ed has sparked a call from within the Republican National Committee to change party rules to protect Trump from any long-shot primary challenge in 2020.

The RNC committeeman representing the Virgin Islands late Tuesday emailed fellow elected members of the national party urging them to change the rules when they convene in New Mexico for their annual winter meeting later this month. Republicans are confident that Trump would hold off any primary challenger, but worry the campaign would derail his re-election.

“Look, the political history is clear. No Republican president opposed for re-nomination has ever won re-election,” RNC committeeman Jevon O.A. Williams said in a email obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Unfortunately, loopholes in the rules governing the 2020 re-nomination campaign are enabling these so-called Republicans to flirt with the possibility of contested primaries and caucuses.”

Note the phrase so-called Republicans. Clearly, the RINO meme is still strong and active among the Republicans, compressing everyone into an automatic bow to President Trump – or a hip-check right out of the GOP.

And will the RNC bow to this inevitable logic and never consider the possibility – nay, certainty – that a weak President Trump running for re-election is inferior to a primary challenger who just might beat him? That’ll measure just how far this profound rot has set in to the Republicans. It’s implicit in Williams’ email, an almost holy belief that Trump is their leader who cannot be betrayed, dumped, or even questioned. He must be protected.

Probably because he’s just not tough enough.

Now perhaps Williams and those who end up agreeing with him view this as an investment on their part. They’ve pledged allegiance to Trump, which takes more than a little political coin, and if they lose him then their political careers are down the drain.

But I think there is an equal part a firm belief in Trump’s charisma and success, persistent despite the failures of the last two years. While willingness to put in one’s lot with a leader is not a measure of a person’s worth, moral or otherwise, the willingness to stick with a third-rater like Trump indicates an inability to evaluate the evidence, an intellectual laziness which does, in fact, signal a second-rate or third-rate intellect.

So will the RNC go along with the proposal? I suspect that as soon as Trump realizes how this proposal will safeguard him from a challenge, he’ll demand it be implemented, long-term consequences be damned.

And the nation will be poorer for it.

One of the salient Special Counsel Mueller mysteries is detailed in this Politico piece:

This month’s three-page summary D.C. Circuit decision revealed a fairly dry set of legal issues that just might conceal a juicy core. The dry issues involved matters of jurisdiction and statutory interpretation fathomed only by elite appellate lawyers, but the potentially juicier underlying issues hinted of fascination: Somewhere, a corporation (a bank? a communications firm? an energy company?) owned by a foreign state (Russia? Turkey? Ukraine? United Arab Emirates? Saudi Arabia?) had engaged in transactions that had an impact in the United States and on matters involved in the special counsel’s investigation. …

And then came Roberts’ surprise Sunday decision. He is the “circuit justice” for the D.C. Circuit, meaning he is the justice assigned to receive emergency and other petitions arising from that circuit. Under Supreme Court rules, the circuit justice may act without consulting his or her colleagues to dispose of routine rulings. So, we should not read too much into the fact that it is the chief justice in particular who acted here.

But we can read a good deal into his decision to intervene at all. Although every judge below agreed there was ultimately no merit to the Corporation’s legal claims, Roberts evidently harbors some doubt. Something in the Corporation’s papers caught his attention. So rather than consigning this appeal to the discard pile with thousands of others, he has blocked the lower courts’ decisions until he can receive the government’s briefs defending those decisions. Those papers must be filed no later than New Year’s Eve. Once he receives the full briefing, he can reject the Corporation’s appeal or he can advance the matter to the full court for consideration.

I have no idea what may be going on, but, on its face, it’s very interesting. Will the information go public if SCOTUS actually hears these arguments, or will this be a closed hearing? Probably the latter.

And, behind the scenes, this means that at least Chief Justice Roberts may have non-public information concerning the Mueller investigation. While I hope Roberts is capable of rulings on various matters without regards to secret information, it’s possible that this information may influence his behavior, both officially and unofficially. For example, he may give Trump only minimal respect, like much of the Federal judiciary has done so, because he doesn’t want to hitch his boat to a sinking ocean liner.

He’s already reprimanded President Trump once for behavior unbecoming a President, but I doubt Trump understood that. Roberts’ future behavior could become very interesting.

Postiche:

1. Something false; a sham.
2. A small hairpiece; a toupee. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in Agatha Christie’s Partners In Crime.

I see Mitt Romney (R-UT), Senator-elect of Utah, former governor of Massachusetts, and failed Presidential contender, has decided to be the first to the mat to wrestle control of the Republican Party from President Trump, if his op-ed in WaPo is any clue. Here’s where he reached out to the disaffected:

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

These are mostly long-time tenets of the Republican Party, with the exception of reforming criminal justice. He also makes a probably debatable call for fiscal responsibility. Why is it misguided? For the Republicans, it’s a talking point, useful in debates, but nothing they’ve taken seriously.

So can Romney wrest control from Trump? I doubt it. Many of the disaffected have actually left the Party, and the rest have fallen into the unfortunate mode of supporting the President regardless of whether or not his positions make sense.

But it is possible Romney is looking to start a new political party, built from those disaffected conservatives as well as conservative-leaning independents. This is a carefully crafted call to rejecting Trump on the basis of how he’s fallen from conservative ideals as well as simple competency.

Will it work? I doubt it. He does not project any recognition of some of the core problems with the conservative movement of the last forty years, and without a good dig at those cancers with the appropriate scalpel, it’s hard to see how he’ll replace Trump with himself.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, New Horizons has reached and passed by the Kuiper Belt rock dubbed Ultima Thule sometime in the last 24 hours, and is now in the process of transmitting the data it’s collected. Here’s the latest pic from the latest story on the Johns Hopkins APL web site:

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons’ high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist’s impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima’s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

An exciting time for us space exploration junkies. I’m mostly in it for the drama, of course.

Gary Sargent posts on The Plum Line about how Democrats should negotiate the shutdown with President Trump, and one of his points is inadequately developed:

[Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin] McAleenan also said something else on ABC that hints at how Democrats should proceed. He repeatedly stressed that increased economic development aid to the Northern Triangle countries, something the State Department is advocating, would help mitigate the migrant crisis, since many asylum seekers are motivated by desperate poverty at home.

This puts him at odds with Trump’s threats to cut off aid to those countries — and more deeply, is premised on a completely different narrative of the crisis than the falsehood-riddled cartoon version that Trump has adopted as part of his wall push. Getting officials on the record in more detail on these deeper differences would also be useful.

I’ve posted about the short-sightedness of putting up a wall vs investigating why people are abandoning their countries in droves^[1], and it’s good to see that some government agencies have looked into this angle, even if it’s only to send aid.

But it seems to me that Sargent misses a bet here, because he doesn’t suggest that Democrats should incorporate these findings directly into negotiations. That is, I think the next proposal from the Democrats should simply be this:

You get no money for your wall. However, we’ll add $10 billion in aid to the countries from which the immigrants are coming.

And their messaging should emphasize how this will theoretically slow the flow of emigrants.

This will put Trump in a bind, because it’s an eminently sensible, if possibly fruitless, idea that’ll appeal to the left and independents, but the lack of money for the wall will appall President Trump’s handlers at Fox News, as well as his base. If Trump has any ambition for the next two years, not to mention for re-election, he has to appeal to voters beyond his base.

But if he does, his base will hate him.

¹ I cannot think of how to search for those posts at the moment, unfortunately. Bad blogger! The primary point of those posts is that the economic / political activities of the United States, such as subsidizing the export of foodstuffs to those countries, may be ultimately responsible for the movement of these people towards our borders.